Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 104 - Tour of Devin Clones

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1804943886143439272 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 104: Tour of Devin Clones We explore the top Devin clones an... Upload date: 20240623 Transcription model: mlx-whisper/mlx-community/whisper-tiny Generated at: 2026-06-01T18:06:54Z

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[00:00] Christopher David: Okay auto devs. Before we get going let's take a look at what is available elsewhere on the internet for

[00:08] Christopher David: Devon clones and some related projects we can probably learn from. The biggest one probably is open Devon.

[00:17] Christopher David: We got that working locally yesterday.

[00:23] Christopher David: Let's take a look at the screenshot of my conversation here.

[00:28] Christopher David: So with two or three kind of prompts for me I was able to get this to create a basic

[00:38] Christopher David: Go-Ling web socket server that had also an index.html that you showed the number of connected clients.

[00:46] Christopher David: It's a little simple little demo app. It was able to build that.

[00:50] Christopher David: The Python screen had some interesting like output. It was doing certain things using a Jupyter notebook for code execution.

[00:58] Christopher David: Interesting. I wasn't able to figure out how to get it to actually run in the thing.

[01:03] Christopher David: But when I pasted the four files into my local editor here and ran it.

[01:21] Christopher David: It worked.

[01:23] Christopher David: Basically, I saw in their Slack that they're debating how to extend this with plugins.

[01:34] Christopher David: They're talking in here about maybe we should remove plugins.

[01:40] Christopher David: It might be hard because we have to support all this stuff.

[01:44] Christopher David: So let's check out ex-dism.

[01:47] Christopher David: I don't know that their architecture will work with how we're envisioning doing things but you know wish best luck to them.

[01:53] Christopher David: We'll continue keeping an eye on their project.

[01:56] Christopher David: The other project Devon with an O seemed quite similar to that.

[02:02] Christopher David: They've got a new electron based UI and I was able to easily give it a local code base of mine and have it.

[02:10] Christopher David: I asked questions about it. I didn't try this out too much.

[02:15] Christopher David: But it seemed quite similar to Open Devon.

[02:19] Christopher David: Also Open Source.

[02:21] Christopher David: Meet. Thank you very much.

[02:23] Christopher David: And out of curiosity.

[02:25] Christopher David: Did I go that down?

[02:27] Christopher David: Clown.

[02:30] Christopher David: Entropy Research Devon. Is this also Python stuff?

[02:34] Christopher David: Yeah.

[02:37] Christopher David: Okay. Lots of Python.

[02:39] Christopher David: More Python.

[02:41] Christopher David: Sweet agent related project.

[02:43] Christopher David: This is one of a number of academic teams taking a crack.

[02:49] Christopher David: They're really focused on this sweet bench benchmark.

[02:52] Christopher David: Which I used to care about.

[02:54] Christopher David: But I don't really care about so much these days.

[02:58] Christopher David: If you do care about it, Ray from this Open Devon Discord channel has got a pretty good.

[03:05] Christopher David: An official leader board that includes all of the self reported scores from the different groups trying different things.

[03:10] Christopher David: Some of these haven't released their code.

[03:12] Christopher David: I haven't seen code for those.

[03:14] Christopher David: Top ones.

[03:15] Christopher David: But there's Open Devon there.

[03:17] Christopher David: Devon down here.

[03:19] Christopher David: Everyone's kind of like trying to beat Devon on that benchmark because they trumpeted loudly when they announced their large funding.

[03:27] Christopher David: A couple months ago.

[03:29] Christopher David: They've been thoroughly beaten and I don't think anybody cares because there's now just sort of like a race to actually monetize it.

[03:35] Christopher David: Devon and that other one I forget what's called rogue ghost something.

[03:44] Christopher David: In England.

[03:45] Christopher David: They're both closed source and focused on enterprise.

[03:47] Christopher David: They're not going to be giving access to Rando's like us anytime soon.

[03:50] Christopher David: So yeah, we're going to build like an open version of this that's usable and also accessible.

[03:56] Christopher David: So what else should we say about this?

[03:58] Christopher David: Ater is super cool.

[04:00] Christopher David: Not like an agentic loop situation, but everyone seems to love Ater and Ray about how they have some of the best algorithms for like building abstract syntax trees of code bases like representing a code base in this very compressed format that's easy to have.

[04:19] Christopher David: LLM's reason about.

[04:22] Christopher David: But it's really the name of the game there is making surgical code updates.

[04:27] Christopher David: Kind of as a pair programmer, which we want to have that be a step more agentic, but I'm sure we'll kind of learn more specifically from Ater.

[04:35] Christopher David: Why next is probably what I'm most excited about here and also the least related to everything else, but this really dovetails with our existing plugins plan.

[04:46] Christopher David: You know, we're using ex-tism, this wasm framework for writing these plugins in any of eight to ten languages that can be consumed from all sorts of different languages that have little like discrete pieces of agentic functionality as these little building blocks that are.

[05:00] Christopher David: I'd be as for those to be reusable, composable, interoperable, so you can build agents from these plugins.

[05:06] Christopher David: What we still need is like an execution environment for this.

[05:10] Christopher David: The execution environments that are out there, I think open dev in are one of these projects I just mentioned uses a to be for example, and it's just so very Python focused.

[05:20] Christopher David: Maybe they have some JavaScript versions of that too, but it's all a lot of these are just like wrappers on top of Jupiter notebooks or their sort of version of that.

[05:30] Christopher David: I wanted something a little bit more in line with our wasm approach, and I didn't know until just yesterday discovering this gentleman.

[05:42] Christopher David: Jeff Lindsay aka prog.g.m.

[05:46] Christopher David: He had some tweet about how he had just figured out how to get like VS code running like locally in a browser via wasm like what the heck.

[05:58] Christopher David: Anyway, so let's take a look at his thing here when I said I think that this may be what we do for some of our actual code execution like where the agents are actually going to be living and operating.

[06:10] Christopher David: So we don't want to just like mediate it through our cloud like to the extent that we can have things be kind of like local slash built into a browser that would be cool.

[06:19] Christopher David: Okay, so web native unix like development environment.

[06:22] Christopher David: I'll just step through some of the bullet points here.

[06:24] Christopher David: I recommend people watch the actual demo here as well as his kind of like thesis post I'll touch on that in a second.

[06:30] Christopher David: So the features of WANIX run and create command line to y and web apps in the environment go compiler that runs in browser can cost compile to native platforms.

[06:39] Christopher David: Plugable files system API for custom file system behavior like fuse slash plan nine units like shell that can be live edited reconpiled or replaced entirely built in micro editor similar to nano supports TypeScript and JSX in web applications without extra tooling.

[06:53] Christopher David: Authentication using off zero for deploying as a backend to static site get hub file system for directly manipulating repository ranges.

[07:01] Christopher David: And all of this is open source and built in ways that you can kind of like upgrade these different pieces like I want to add them to this they went and added VS code about an ad vim so I'm sure like.

[07:11] Christopher David: Whatever we want to build in terms of our opinions into this, including additional pieces that would be more relevant for agents I'm sure that that could be done.

[07:19] Christopher David: But this seems to work I've got a version of this deployed and you can kind of easily run it locally.

[07:27] Christopher David: But you can do things like I can run an app to do app is in here and this is like synced to other people.

[07:36] Christopher David: I don't fully understand what parts of it are like fully local versus what happens at the file system level.

[07:42] Christopher David: But it's just kind of like a Linux like terminal here that you can do interesting things.

[07:47] Christopher David: One of the other apps that are in here test app is one that I was working on but you can like create an app folder that has an index dot h chml.

[07:53] Christopher David: And then you can like run it and like pops up in this iFrame on top of it.

[07:58] Christopher David: You can also do things like you can pull in a dot wasm file and execute it or because this you.

[08:05] Christopher David: They've shipped the go compiler into the wasm module so that this can recompile go programs you can like literally code in this.

[08:14] Christopher David: Change like these go applications recompile them and then execute those so I mean it's kind of cool for a human but it's even more cool for an agent.

[08:24] Christopher David: And then multiple agents because this is kind of built with collaboration in mind like why you do this in part of a web browser because a multiple people can or agents can you know interact with the same environment.

[08:37] Christopher David: A code environment that's uniquely sort of like editable by agents.

[08:43] Christopher David: Man there's a lot of possibility here's a particularly combining it with our plugin system so this might be kind of what powers our.

[08:54] Christopher David: Thing on the right here where we have the threadless message list and the agent workspace.

[09:01] Christopher David: This might be.

[09:03] Christopher David: Wannix right there so we'll do some further dives on that in upcoming videos.

[09:09] Christopher David: They apparently are on wannix 02 and I think they're adding wasy support in 03 wasy is sort of what's required like the agent plugins you'll have been building us far in ex to some.

[09:21] Christopher David: Require wasy support because they have to do certain things with HDP as something.

[09:26] Christopher David: And they're not going to support that until 03 so.

[09:29] Christopher David: There might be something that we just can't do yet the only to do but we're going to be exploring in that direction and that's all pretty exciting.

[09:36] Christopher David: Web assembly we have assembly we have assembly okay.

[09:40] Christopher David: All lastly kind of reinforce why we care about that particular we have assembly approach.

[09:47] Christopher David: We've been saying in this series often that you know we think that agents need to be composable and interoperable to be maximally useful so that developers can stop reinventing the wheel and just kind of build up a shared suite of building blocks that we can compose agents out of.

[10:03] Christopher David: So we're able to kind of build on each other's work it's like the difference between imagine like the JavaScript development ecosystem before NPM came out and nowadays we have like package registries where you don't have to like build all this other code yourself you can just pull in the modules that you need there should be.

[10:18] Christopher David: Versions of that specific to agent functionality.

[10:21] Christopher David: And using wasom instead of other of these of these janky language is not designed for humans and robots coexisting anyways.

[10:31] Christopher David: I have more thoughts on that but here's like an amazing 13 minute manifesto from the guy behind wazics.

[10:38] Christopher David: I just recommend people read this because it goes into.

[10:42] Christopher David: You know the need for simplicity.

[10:46] Christopher David: The need to build for these generative building blocks as he says and this is like perfectly dope tales with the other stuff that we're working on so you'll see more about whenics and web assembly and stuff as we.

[10:59] Christopher David: Hopefully explore some of this stuff in the next few videos. All right, we're going to pick one of these topics next and start building out our auto devs.